Dirasat, Human and Social Sciences, Volume 46, No. 1, Supplement 2, 2019 - 51 - © 2019 DSR Publishers/University of Jordan. All Rights Reserved. ________________________________________________ * The Department of English Language and Literature Yarmouk University, Jordan (1), The Department of Sociology and Social Service, Yarmouk University, Jordan (2). Received on 24/03/2017 and Accepted for Publication on 22/12/2017. My Name is Salma and I am a Victim of Honor Crimes: (Re) conceptualizing Honor Killing and Stigma against Women Aya Akkawi, Ayat Nashwan * ABSTRACT The present study examines honor killings through applying Goffman's theory of stigma when a sample of 207 students of a public university in Jordan attended a literary work performed on stage. The study follows an interdisciplinary method by examining the social interaction between the audience ('normals' from Goffman's point of view) and Salma— the stigmatized character in Fadia Faqir's My Name is Salma, and her family. One of the significant findings of the study is that a high level of students' perception towards justifying Salma's sin, after considering and analyzing her conditions, believes that she doesn't deserve to be murdered in the name of honor. Keywords: Honor killing; stigma; Erving Goffman; Jordan; Fadia Faqir; My Name is Salma. Introduction and Statement of the Problem There are many stories that recount the tragedies of honor crimes in Jordan, which are often victimized by girls bringing social stigma to the female family. Honor crimes are as contradictory as they are in the manifestation of the killing of the human spirit, which is often practiced by families and tribes without a legal reservation to achieve social honor, or to refute the fallacies surrounding the doubts and attitudes of the dishonored families. This raises a number of questions about the nature of the social systems that have failed to spread the awareness of the huge impact of such violent practices on the individual as well as the society, and about the penal laws that the society has established to protect victims yet failed and continue to neglect to prevent or restrain the violent practices conducted by the victim’s family. In Arab and Muslim societies in general, the value of honor is paramount and is deeply entrenched. This value is so important that many people consider what is committed in the name of honor as a defense of honor and the family’s only salvation to escape social stigma. In this important body of work, the idea of social stigma is questioned and investigated. Erving Goffman (1963) defined stigma as “an attribute that extensively discredits an individual, reducing him or her from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one” (p.3). Consequently, since stigma is practiced and attributed by individuals who live in a society, we could refer to it as social stigma because it conceptualizes the perception, the behavior and attitude of the ordinary individuals who discriminate themselves from the stigmatized ones. The perpetrators of honor crimes hate to be stigmatized when a female member of the family conducts a dishonorable behavior. They feel obligated immediately to conduct a violent action that help wipe out the stigma and shame that will haunt the family name. Thus, it is convincingly noticed that these two phenomena continue to be justified in the social, national, tribal and poor educational dimensions without being referenced to the religious and legal ones. It may be the case for stigmatized families, therefore, that honor killing is the only way to wipe tribal and familial stigma.